Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Annapurna . . . remained a complete enigma. We had seen the mountain from afar off, lord-
ing it over groves of seven-thousanders, but the closer we got to it the hazier our ideas of its
topography became, for all our painstaking reconnaissances.
The parties scouting Dhaulagiri had run head-on into one impasse after another.
Now, however, Herzog and his companions stumbled upon some good luck.
In late April, as they had ascended the valley of the Kali Gandaki toward the moun-
tain village of Tukucha, they had noticed a savage, narrow ravine entering on the right.
The natives called this chasm the Miristi Khola. The valley looked too small to offer a
highway into the hidden sanctuary of Annapurna, but the climbers were given pause
by the huge volume of water plunging out of the gorge. It looked to the eye as though
the Miristi Khola headed against a relatively minor massif called the Nilgiris; but that
torrent suggested a massive glacier at its source. The unreliable map, moreover, indic-
ated that the Miristi Khola led straight north of Annapurna to a pass labeled the Ti-
licho Col. Yet when the Sherpa sirdar Ang-Tharkey questioned the locals, no one had
any knowledge of either the Tilicho Col or of any path leading up the gorge.
The lower stretches of the chasm, in any event, looked impossible to traverse. Yet
on April 27, Herzog sent Schatz, Couzy, and the team doctor, Jacques Oudot, along
with Ang-Tharkey and several other Sherpas off on a foray to see if they could climb
to the top of the long south ridge of the Nilgiris and peer over into the Miristi Khola
from partway up its course. The steep slope leading up to the ridge was covered with
jungle, but the reconnoiterers found a faint path through the trees and thickets, with
cairns here and there and even disused terraces. Despite local ignorance of the Miristi
Khola, evidently shepherds and farmers over the years had climbed high toward the
Nilgiri ridge.
At last the party topped out in a narrow notch in the ridge. The view that greeted
them was provocative and confounding. Fully 3,000 feet below, the Miristi Khola
plunged through cataracts. In the distance rose Annapurna, magnificent and daunting,
but of the map's purported Tilicho Col, they could see no vestige. It looked as though
the Miristi drained at least the west face of Annapurna, and possibly the north face,
but all the men could see in the form of a climbing route was a precipitous arête of rock
and ice. The Northwest Spur, as the team began calling this arête, looked as though it
would present a formidable challenge were it in the Alps, let alone at altitudes above
18,000 feet in the Himalaya. What was more, the men could not tell whether the top
of the spur linked up with the summit snowfields of Annapurna, or simply dead-ended
in yet another high ridge the map had failed to record.
Couzy and Schatz pushed on from the notch, traversing four miles along the steep
southwest shoulder of the Nilgiris. A narrow, broken ledge offered the only possible
